The Real World News and Commentary – September 25, 2012

Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet today praised the decision by President Obama to designate Chimney Rock as a national monument. The president will use his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to make the designation.

“Chimney Rock contains the rare combination of a spectacular geologic formation with extraordinary cultural, historical and archeological significance. Coloradans have made it clear that those attributes should be matched with national monument status. It will be an extraordinary boost for the region and the state. For the last three years we’ve been making that case to Congress and more recently we’ve been urging the Administration to use its authority under the Antiquities Act,” Bennet said.

“The President’s establishment of Chimney Rock National Monument will preserve and protect the site and drive tourism, drawing more visitors to the region and the state and bringing more dollars into the local economy.”

In the end, Bennet profited mightily from the same flavors of financial manipulations that destabilized Wall Street and led to the crash of 2008, and the loss of millions of jobs and billions in lost productivity.

And while Denver taxpayers will take years to climb out of the mess at Denver Public Schools, will voters keep an experienced corporate raider in an appointed United States Senate seat?

Through the end of 2009, executives and family members associated with Anschutz Co., Anschutz Group or Anschutz Investments donated more to Bennet — $39,400 — than to any other federal candidate.

Executives from Qwest and, more unusually, Union Pacific — companies in which Anschutz once had large holdings but has recently divested — and PACs associated with them have added another $67,800 to Bennet’s war chest.

Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system’s chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal’s advantages, according to interviews with its members.

To avoid mounting expenses, the Denver schools are looking to renegotiate the deal. But to unwind it all, the schools would have to pay the banks $81 million in termination fees, or about 19 percent of its $420 million payroll.

Surely President Obama Is Joking About This ‘Have Larry Summers Run The World Bank’ Thing!

Consider: As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy treasury secretary and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial industry. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that caused so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.

Perkins writes that his economic projections cooked the books Enron-style to convince foreign governments to accept billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and other institutions to build dams, airports, electric grids, and other infrastructure he knew they couldn’t afford. The loans were given on condition that construction and engineering contracts went to U.S. companies. Often, the money would simply be transferred from one bank account in Washington, D.C., to another one in New York or San Francisco.

The deals were smoothed over with bribes for foreign officials, but it was the taxpayers in the foreign countries who had to pay back the loans. When their governments couldn’t do so, as was often the case, the U.S. or its henchmen at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund would step in and essentially place the country in trusteeship, dictating everything from its spending budget to security agreements and even its United Nations votes.

It was, Perkins writes, a clever way for the U.S. to expand its “empire” at the expense of Third World citizens.

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